


Come Josephine

by levendis



Category: Boardwalk Empire, Gallifrey (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: Crossover, F/M, oldfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-07
Updated: 2014-11-07
Packaged: 2018-02-24 12:16:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2581178
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/levendis/pseuds/levendis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>FOBWATCHES. FOBWATCHES EVERYWHERE. Nucky, Margaret, Van Alden, and the sense that history is somehow repeating itself. Set vaguely mid-season one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Come Josephine

  
  
1.  
  
Nucky Thompson didn't build Atlantic City, Atlantic City was built for him. Like a machine, some vast Mechanical Turk: it's not so much about the cogs and levers, but the man underneath pulling strings. The craftsmen, skilled though they might have been, are secondary at best. This city belongs to him, fully and completely. And it'd be nothing without him.  
  
Atlantic City is a world unto itself. He dreams sometimes that it literally is its own world, lifted from the map and folded into a sphere. It has another name, and he has another name, but upon waking he loses both; still, the heart of the dream lingers. It's a strangeness even the fortune teller can't interpret. Tell me about before, he wants to say to her. When I was someone else.  
  
Most everything here is his, and what isn't he endeavors to take. The shops, the rackets, the hearts and minds (and votes and wallets) of each citizen. And Margaret Schroeder. Dear, sweet Margaret. He does what he does because that's how things work - reductive, perhaps, but pragmatic as well. He widowed her barely thinking of the implications, then took her against the wall of her run-down shoe-box house because he couldn't think of anything else. This is what happens. From the moment he first saw her, he knew.   
  
The logic, if it exists, evades him. This is dangerous in more ways than he cares to count. This is a weakness, a faultline he is allowing to grow. He'd been so cautious for so long, and now this shopgirl, this alarmingly straight-forward, incomprehensibly genuine member of the Women's Temperance League (of all things) has stepped past his defenses with little more than a smile and a how-do-you-do. He can't quite figure it.   
  
She's beautiful, true, a greater beauty than a man like him has any right to claim, and smarter than most, and good in a way he will never be. Maybe, like his brother says, it's that goodness that compells him. Maybe it's the sense that he can confess to her anything, that she can forgive even his greatest sins. Maybe not. What does he feel when he breaks her, compromises her? Sadness? Pride? Satisfaction? Or deja vu, that dream surfacing again, an unsettling conviction that he's done this before.  
  
He looks at her, sees the way she looks at him, and he is certain that there's more to her, more to the both of them, than this life can possibly allow.  
  
(And the thing in his head when he burns his father's house down, and the thing in his chest when he holds her, and the voice not quite heard aloud saying push harder, and reach higher, and stretch your arms out until it's America that's yours, until it's the White House itself that answers to you, and forget about shopgirls and that tiny twinge that might be your conscience; saying tighten your tie and shine your shoes, there's work to be done. The pull in both directions, and he knows he can't be two men, and sooner or later he'll have to choose: ambition or family? It's down to the luck of the draw, and the benevolence of the house. It has to be. This is Atlantic City, after all.)  
  
  
  
  
  
  
2.  
  
His name feels incomplete without _from the Bureau of Internal Revenue_ attached to the end of it. He could give up his Christian name entirely and not feel the loss as strongly as another might. Nelson Van Alden the man is small and unexceptional, another frail, fallen creature on a planet teeming with life. The mission is what sets him apart. The mission is everything.  
  
He is doing the Lord's work. He believes this absolutely. There is no pride or ambition in his conviction that he was meant for this. It simply is. This Babylon by the shore, this Gomorrah, it needs him to wash it clean. He is faithful, uncorrupted, he trusts his savior and his government equally and completely. There could be no one else. He is the hand of God, and he will do what he must.   
  
Atlantic City cannot help but crumble into dust. Held together by the degenerate population's shared vices and decadence, and more importantly held together by Enoch Thompson, the tower will fall when the right pieces are pulled. A new city will rise in its place, or the swamps will reassert their claim, or the whole edifice will drift, boardwalk and all, out with the tide. However it happens, whatever God wills, Van Alden himself is unconcerned with the particulars.   
  
All particulars except, of course, Margaret Schroeder. She is the key, although he doesn't know, or won't admit, why. There's no reason hers should be the only soul worth saving, no reason he should want to rescue her and her alone from eternal damnation. He supposes she represents every child led astray, every lost lamb. She is a sign of the rightness of his path.  
  
But it's more than that, isn't it. And she isn't a child. Young, certainly, her body still unblemished by the repercussions of her actions, but not a child. And more real, more present in his mind than any symbol should be. He recognizes the ugly stirrings of lust, the base and impure thoughts crowding the back of his mind. He _wants_ her, with a passion that shames and sickens him. It's a demon that he cannot force out, not even with the lash.  
  
He has visions of her, sometimes as she is, sometimes with a different, half-familiar face. He doesn't question this. The spirit speaks as it will. He has visions of her in another dying city, and here it is not a man she fruitlessly tries to change but the city itself, ancient and resolute in its perversion. He sees her ruined and destitute, he sees her banished; he sees himself following, into hell and beyond, bound to her by a force he cannot explain. Alone, in the darkest part of night, he sees himself as her servant, and her lover.  
  
Maybe it's his own soul he should be afraid for.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
3.  
  
The question of suffrage feels almost beside the point. Woman should vote (and more, a small part of her suggests), there's not an argument to be made against it that will withstand scrutiny. Margaret is somewhat less convinced about Prohibition. She'd fought hard for it, and believes in the precepts still, but in execution it's proving to be problematic at best. Alcohol has not evaporated, and with criminalization comes criminals, increasingly desperate and notorious. The rats are out of the hold. And at the top, King Rat himself.  
  
She says that, she only half believes it. If she really meant it she wouldn't be sharing his bed. Consorting with a known gangster and bootlegger, what would her mother say. There is kindness in Enoch, true. There is good in him, if only she could just keep sight of it. That's a tidy excuse, to be sure, and one she'd never thought she'd make. What worth does kindness have if it comes paired with an even greater cruelty? This relationship, which she cannot for the life of her find words to properly define, this union is as poisonous as bathtub gin. There's no way around it. If she's changing him, it's no more than he is changing her.   
  
She's not a whore, whatever Mr. Van Alden might say. She's made a calculated move. She's providing for her children. But she knows what Enoch is, and what she's become by consenting to this, by wanting this. She knows she's losing her moral ground. She's submitting to him, as she did with Hans, as she's done with every man in her life.   
  
And, Lord help her, she doesn't always care.   
  
  
  
All the things that held her to her old life start falling away. Her children are undoubtedly forgetting what it was like, before. She is too. The one truth that Mr. Van Alden had to give her was that she wasn't the girl in that photograph anymore, the earnest immigrant fleeing a beloved but broken home. Ireland is a million miles and a thousand years away. She has new friends, new dresses, new shoes. A new compass.   
  
She's brought the locket with her. Call it a keepsake. Call it for old time's sake. She's not sure how she arrived by it, though surely her mother must have given it to her, or an old sweetheart. She's more than enough sentiment to make up for the lapse in memory.   
  
The locket is small, silver, unassuming; it's tarnished and old, much older than the chain it swings from (itself an heirloom, or more accurately someone else's heirloom, rescued from the window display of a pawn shop). The celtic knot on the front impossibly intricate, curling and entwining past her eyes' abilities. She thinks sometimes about polishing it, but can't quite bring herself to hold it for that long. It resonates too strongly of home, all the loss and heartache and guilt bundled inside, the odd warmth of it in her hands threatening to awake some forgotten grief sleeping deep within her.   
  
It's a thing of great beauty, and a thing of great terror. Superstition, most likely. The magic talisman from a dozen children's stories. She can laugh off the fear and desire it evokes, but she always puts it back in the jewelry box.  
  
If this were a story, she'd say there was an entire kingdom inside the locket, a citadel shining red and gold, and whole lives wrapped up small as they'll go. If this were a story she'd open it and reawaken as her true self: a princess, a queen even. She'd be transported, transformed, like Dorothy was swept away to Oz. And she'd be something better and brighter than dowdy Peg, something purer than a mistress, something entirely more powerful than any woman could be on Earth. If this were a story.  
  
Potential, if never tapped, can be anything you want it to be. Let the dream live, even if that's all it is. So, with a certain amount of superstition, and more than a little childish hope, she keeps the locket closed. You never know.


End file.
